Dear Editor,

THE PPP/C government has made massive strides in initiating the physical transformation of Guyana: Roads, bridges, housing schemes, and energy projects are reshaping our national landscape. Yet the greater challenge now lies ahead: transforming our civic culture — our values, attitudes and behaviours in relation to ourselves, our communities and our nation.

As its manifesto recognises, this task requires a bold and intentional civic- education programme. But civic education cannot be confined to the classroom. It must be embedded in the everyday experiences that allow citizens to see themselves as part of something larger than family or group. It must be lived in the public spaces where Guyanese encounter one another, share traditions and imagine a collective future.

Global research underscores this point. Professor Fernando Reimers (2023) shows, through comparative work in Japan, Singapore, South Africa, and the United States, that civic education flourishes when it is tied to national realities and supported by deliberate state action. Where it is neglected, democratic values weaken, polarisation rises, and citizens withdraw from one another. Guyana stands at such crossroads.

Here, the idea of imagined communities, as developed by Benedict Anderson, is instructive. Anderson reminds us that nations are not simply legal structures or borders; they are imagined into being through shared practices, stories, and spaces. Citizens must encounter their nation not only in constitutions, but in everyday life, through rituals, festivals, leisure, and shared public environments.

This is why civic education must be woven deliberately into Guyana’s social fabric. Beyond schools, it must extend into tourism, culture, media, and community life. Tourism, in particular, offers powerful lessons. Ironically, it is often when international visitors arrive that locals rediscover the value of rivers, mountains, towns, and cultural spaces. Rather than dismiss this irony, we should harness it.

But to do so, our tourism policy must expand. For too long, Guyana’s tourism has been equated with ecotourism alone. While ecotourism is valuable, it cannot carry the entire civic load. Citizens also need lifestyle tourism: riverside cafés along our rivers and canals; mountain and savannah retreats; open-air leisure spaces along new highways and structured night markets in Georgetown and regional towns and townships. These are not frivolities. They are investments in social cohesion and civic pride.

Evidence from other societies bears this out. In Thailand, night markets are more than commercial venues: they are civic spaces where people of all backgrounds meet, eat, listen to music, window-shop, and coexist peacefully. They are gathering places for people to mix and mingle. Domestic tourism there contributes over US$34 billion annually, with citizens travelling widely within their own country, discovering landscapes and cultures. Such practices strengthen the national imagination. Floating markets and riverside cafés double as cultural schools where people reconnect with identity and tradition. The lesson for Guyana is that lifestyle tourism can be a living classroom of democracy, providing spaces where unity is practised rather than preached.

Guyana, too, has these assets: mighty rivers, fertile savannahs, mountain ranges, rich cultural traditions, and diverse urban centres. What is missing is the deliberate alignment of policies to transform these assets into civic spaces. The Ministry of Tourism, Industry and Commerce can seed investments in lifestyle tourism; the Department of Public Information can showcase these enhanced  spaces as places to enjoy peacefully and symbols of nationhood; the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport can embed them into programmes of youth  tours  and social experience. Working together, they can help weave the social fabric of One Guyana.

The dangers of neglect are real. Race-based mobilisation in politics, economic dependence on extractive industries, and media polarisation threaten to narrow civic horizons. Left unaddressed, these forces could undermine the incipient national unity the government has painstakingly built. As Professor Reimers warns, civic education withers when democracies are under stress. But with foresight, Guyana can steer away from this.

Civic culture is never built by instruction alone. It flourishes when education, tourism, media, and culture converge to provide lived opportunities for people to act as citizens. When a family gathers at a riverside café, when  people share space at a night market, when  families travel to see parts of the country they had never visited—these are acts of nation-building. They are moments when people imagine Guyana not just as a place of residence, but also as a shared home.

The PPP/C government has already proven it can deliver physical transformation. Its next historic task is the democratic transformation of the Guyanese spirit itself. A bold civic-education programme, anchored in schools, reinforced by state media, and expanded through lifestyle tourism and cultural spaces, offers the surest path to make this transformation real and lasting. It is how we move from infrastructure to identity, from development to unity, from aspiration to the lived reality of One Guyana.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Walter H Persaud